Lips tremble like he’s holding back another sob-hiccup. “Our time together here was very short. Too short.” Seb is the only person who might understand my pit of loss right now, even as I struggle to understand what her absence at the morgue means. She could be out there—injured, alone, scared—waiting for me at this very second, hoping I find her before someone else does. Or she could simply be gone; she could be dead, just not lying in the morgue, but buried somewhere else.

A German couple passes, gesturing to the engraved rock beside us, breaking through my panic. Deep breath. Angela wants me here. Divining her research was a clue. The catacombs are her research subject. This is the right next step.

I step into a new gallery of bones. Breathe. “Did you help with Angela’s work? I don’t know if neurology really applies to urban planning.”

Seb sniffles. “Not exactly. But I enjoyed hearing about her learnings. A geologist I know conducts archaeological research in the catacombs, and Angela applied for his internship so she could spend more time in the ossuary after the tour office closed.”

“Naturally.” I shudder, imagining these passages empty of visitors and even creepier. “Anything else hidden here besides skeletons?”

“Oh yes.” He perks up. “It is a labyrinth. Full of secrets and surprises around every corner. In the late eighteen hundreds, the caretaker of the catacombs went missing.” He gestures with his hands—poof! Gone. “Ten years later, his body was found in an obscure area, not usually frequented. A man so intimately acquainted with the ossuaries, the caretaker himself, became lost to his death.” Seb leans in, then wiggles his eyebrows. “Naturally—anything can happen down here.”

I squint at him, then walk a few steps ahead. Disturbing anecdote aside, he thinks we’re friendly enough to tease me. Cute.

Several paths lead in the same direction, according to a mounted plaque. Beneath the plaque, a security guard reaches into a knapsack at his feet and takes out a baguette sandwich. My belly growls at the crisp scent of lettuce and ham in this dusty, dirty setting. The normalcy of it unlocks something in my brain. “Has anyone ever lived down here? I mean, have these—” I motion to the well-crafted walkways, smooth roofs, and pillars holding up seventy-five feet of earth. “Were these always used as quarries?”

Angela disappeared from campus in the chaos of a school shooting. A tiny voice inside me has been wondering since I saw her thesis draft: Could she have escaped to the catacombs? Was she then followed by her ultimate attacker? Fully allowing the notion to form, then giving life to the question, is liberating. I step forward, the better to catch Seb’s answer.

He rubs the back of his neck. “Speaking as a scientist, and having worked with several archaeology teams here, no. No one has ever lived down here. Only died.”